Agreed, it’s just getting worse and worse, if you’re lucky you might get one or two bars of reception, but if you do it’s pointless because the data doesn’t work anyway. I am sick to death of having to go out on the street to make a call or send an iMessage. I grew up on a farm in the GSM days, and reception was poor, but in the middle of the city why does I feel like I’m in rural Australia in 2002?? Pretty much there is eight hours each workday I can’t use my phone. I am in the process of educating the hundreds if not thousands of people in Collins Square of the complaints process and the TIO process. It will start with flyers in the common areas, then group emails etc.

Outsider here (Vodafone customer!), but I have also been searching for information on this problem as I believe Vodafone to be just as bad...while generally I find them fantastic now. I'm a consultant and visit customer sites in various locations on Collins Street, I have found in ALL of them near Southern Cross (567, 699, 700, 750 Collins St) that there is virtually no data throughput above street level and making a call is very unreliable. Sometimes I am trying to use my phone as a hotspot and leave it near the window...still nothing. There is no problem in central Collins St e.g. near Elizabeth Street, Swanston St etc.

I was told by a manager in one of these buildings who has investigated this due to many employee complaints that there is some sort of Telstra monopoly on cells in this part of the city but I didn't get the full details.

Can confirm that both Telstra and Optus have terrible reception in the building. Even though you often get 2-4 bars of 4G+ in the building the internet slows to a crawl. What it leads me to believe is that everyone's phones are trying to hug to one frequency and there is just too much traffic being slammed given how many people are in 727 Collins St. I think the only solution that Optus/Telstra can do is partnering with Collins Place to roll out one repeater microcell in the lift area of each level. That would ultimately ensure that there is data flowing for each subscriber.

Would be very interested to hear from Optus if they can see lots of congestion for the towers that face towards Collins Square. I suspect this problem largely relates to the design of the 5 buildings that make it rather difficult for data to traverse.

Optus has acknowledged there is an issue and they have deployed their network team to review the network and try to resolve this issue. I have got a 2nd mobile sim in the mean time so running a dual sim set up and will check back in later to let you know how the fix is going.